In bridge to past, this Duke team follows in the handprints of its predecessors
In certain moments this season, when Duke’s coaches felt like the players needed a reminder of the legacy they had sworn to uphold, the old clips would come out. Standard definition, converted-from-VHS, grainy archive stuff from the Duke teams that made Duke into Duke. Vintage stuff, literally not figuratively.
“Just the tough Duke teams, the floor-slapping, the together Duke teams,” Wendell Moore said.
When the Blue Devils slapped the floor in the final minute of Thursday night’s win over Texas Tech, they somehow tapped into a collective memory they didn’t even know they had, in the handprints of their predecessors: Tommy Amaker, Steve Wojciechowski, Bobby Hurley.
But none of this current team was even alive when Wojo last slapped the floor in a Duke uniform, and they were infants the last time he did it as an assistant coach on the Duke bench. Whatever emotional connection they have to the teams that first saved and then made Mike Krzyzewski has been nurtured and cultivated. It didn’t come naturally. It didn’t come at all to some of their predecessors, who knew what it meant, but not what it means.
This team has figured out what it really means, resurrecting a Duke ethos that all but died in the one-and-done era, as players came and went before they could truly internalize it. It became a ghost story, told over the campfire in the summer at K Academy, something lost and unlikely to be regained, especially when the 2018 team was mocked for doing it while playing zone — just as its predecessors had been reviled by their detractors for doing it in earnest.
This team, in one night, in one game, brought it all back.
“Watching a bunch of older Duke games, Duke basketball in general, that floor slap is really just a symbol of locking in, let’s get a stop right here,” Duke’s Mark Williams said. “Obviously, you can’t use that every single possession. But certain moments, when you know you need a stop, you know you need that play, that floor slap just signifies like, this is where we’re going to do. We’re going to do it, like, right now.”
The Duke teams that made Duke into Duke, forged over hard years in Krzyzewski’s fiery crucible, became a myth when the players got younger, their tenures shorter. Somehow, this team has made it a reality. The adversity of losing to North Carolina in the game this team just couldn’t lose, and the hangover Duke had in the ACC tournament, packed years of learning into 10 days.
This team got very old, very fast. It looks like the Duke of old. It now acts like the Duke of old.
“The slapping the floor, what the hell? Why not?” Krzyzewski said. “Our guys really wanted that because it’s kind of like crossing the bridge to the brotherhood. They can now say they did that. Hopefully they can say that again, at least on Saturday.”
This team, more than any other in recent Duke history, has lately been able to tap into the spirit of its forebears. Not the past decade of freshman-dominated teams, necessarily, although Thursday’s switch to zone did recall the 2018 team, but the gritty, defense-oriented, never-say-die heart of the classic Duke teams.
This is, of course, a very recent development. But when Duke went out and slapped the floor against Texas Tech, it not only turned the tables on the country’s best defensive team, there was a tangible, almost electric connection with the Duke teams of the past that, no matter what else, could get a stop when they needed one.
“Coach has his ways of getting it across in the preseason about what matters,” Duke coach-in-waiting Jon Scheyer said. “And, you know, we simulate it at the end of practice. We need one stop to win a game, touch the floor. Let’s get it. It actually means something. There’s meaning behind it. And our guys did it. It’s a bond that holds them together to dig deep to get that final stop.”
Krzyzewski will be gone after this season. This team might actually live on, in high definition, for another generation to see.
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This story was originally published March 25, 2022 at 8:54 PM.
